The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins

Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots

Brenda Stevenson

Uses a deeply researched human interest story to explore the worst civil disturbance in modern American history

Focuses on the death of 15-year old Latasha Harlins, not the LAPD's attack on Rodney King, as a key spark that ignited the LA Riots

Through the stories of three individuals, Stevenson weaves together a rich history of modern Los Angeles that deals with race, class, gender and immigration

The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins

Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots

Brenda Stevenson

Description

Helicopters patrolled low over the city, filming blocks of burning cars and buildings, mobs breaking into storefronts, and the vicious beating of truck driver Reginald Denny. For a week in April 1992, Los Angeles transformed into a cityscape of rage, purportedly due to the exoneration of four policemen who had beaten Rodney King. It should be no surprise that such intense anger erupted from something deeper than a single incident.

In The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, Brenda Stevenson tells the dramatic story of an earlier trial, a turning point on the road to the 1992 riot. On March 16, 1991, fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins, an African American who lived locally, entered the Empire Liquor Market at 9172 South Figueroa Street in South Central Los Angeles. Behind the counter was a Korean woman named Soon Ja Du. Latasha walked to the refrigerator cases in the back, took a bottle of orange juice, put it in her backpack, and approached the cash register with two dollar bills in her hand-the price of the juice. Moments later she was face-down on the floor with a bullet hole in the back of her head, shot dead by Du. Joyce Karlin, a Jewish Superior Court judge appointed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, presided over the resulting manslaughter trial. A jury convicted Du, but Karlin sentenced her only to probation, community service, and a $500 fine. The author meticulously reconstructs these events and their aftermath, showing how they set the stage for the explosion in 1992.

An accomplished historian at UCLA, Stevenson explores the lives of each of these three women-Harlins, Du, and Karlin-and their very different worlds in rich detail. Through the three women, she not only reveals the human reality and social repercussions of this triangular collision, she also provides a deep history of immigration, ethnicity, and gender in modern America. Massively researched, deftly written, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins will reshape our understanding of race, ethnicity, gender, and-above all-justice in modern America.

The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins

Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots

Brenda Stevenson

Table of Contents

1. 'Tasha: "Always Energetic, Positive, Full of Energy" 2. Soon Ja Du: "She Had a Good Life in Korea" 3. March 16, 1991: Not Just Another Saturday in South Central 4. People v. Du: The Trial 5. Judge Joyce Karlin: "I Would Dream of Closing Arguments " 6. The People v. Du: Sentencing 7. Whose Fire This Time? Epilogue: Justice?

The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins

Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots

Brenda Stevenson

Author Information

Brenda Stevenson is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her books include The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke and Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South, selected as an Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins

Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots

Brenda Stevenson

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians

"Contested Murder makes it clear the tragedy inside the Empire Market and the violence that followed in South L.A. and Koreatown should be remembered by all Angelenos as a turning point in their history."--Los Angeles Times

"A child's murder, a judicial outrage, and a city on fire: Brenda Stevenson unlocks the secret history of the 1992 Los Angeles riots in this meticulously fair but disturbing account of the Latasha Harlins case."--Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

"As an element of the Los Angeles Riots, the shooting of Latasha Harlins finally gets the attention it deserves from renowned historian Brenda Stevenson. Stevenson gives us fascinating and full portraits of each of the three women involved: the teenage African-American victim, the Korean immigrant shooter, and the Jewish American judge. She traces all three lives deep into the past and forward to that fateful moment in the South Central convenience store in March 1991. A gripping read and a revealing perspective on the varied and intersecting lives of American women at century's end."--Ellen Carol DuBois, author of Through Women's Eyes: An American History

"Not since J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground has a book so sympathetically and powerfully traced personal and group histories to recover the roots of an American tragedy. To Lukas's elucidation of race, ethnicity, religion, and class, Stevenson's excavation of the lives of three women-the decedent, the defendant, and the judge-adds a gendered understanding that explains anew the eruption of violence in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992 and the traumas of inequality in the modern United States."--Stephen Aron, Chair, Autry Institute for the Study of the American West

"The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins is a deeply moving account of the shooting death of a Black female teenager at the hands of a Korean female shopkeeper. With an elegant and elegiac tone, Stevenson charts the biographies of those involved in the outcome of the case-including the presiding Jewish female judge. Stevenson also plumbs the cultural and historical contexts of race, class, and gender in the lives of the women and men who were brought together by the caprice of history as well as its seemingly inevitable designations. She has encompassed all of our histories in an epic manner and written about an episode in our national history to which we should all pay attention."--Lois W. Banner, University of Southern California

The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins

Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots

Brenda Stevenson

From Our Blog

On 9 August 2014, Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson, Missouri (a suburb of St. Louis) Police Department, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old. Officer Wilson is white and Michael Brown was black, sparking allegations from wide swaths of the local and national black community that Wilson's shooting of Brown, and the Ferguson Police Department's reluctance to arrest the officer, are both racially motivated events that smack of an historic trend of black inequality within the US criminal justice system.

By Brenda Stevenson Those who followed the Trayvon Martin case this summer did so not just because of the conflicting details of the shooting deaths of these two unarmed black youth, but because these cases, like too many others, have played out in our public consciousness as markers of American justice.Â Does 'liberty and justice for all' actually exist; or are these words from our Pledge of Allegiance just part of the grand American narrative that is more myth than reality?